In this session, Ingrid Wulczyn joined Michael Barber to answer questions on Hiring and Supporting Special Education Teachers. She is a former special education teacher and administrator and is the founder and CEO of Project IDEA, an organization focused on providing support and resources to schools. She offered some great tips on the support special education teachers need to thrive.

Join the experts as they answer all your questions live on Thursdays on YouTube at 10 am PT / 12 pm CT / 1 pm ET. Charter School Capital – YouTube

Read the Full Transcript:

Michael B.:

Hey everyone, and welcome back to our Thursday Charter Chats. I’m Michael Barber. It’s good to see all of your faces back with us after a few weeks off. I’m really excited to be back on for the next few weeks. We’re talking all things special education teacher attention with our guest today, Ingrid Woolshon. Ingrid, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate you being here. I know you’re traveling at the moment, so we really appreciate you coming back and having a chat with us as a follow-up to our webinar about two weeks ago. We had about 170 attendees during that webinar and had additional questions come in, so do we mind if we just hop right into those questions and have a chat about how we can make sure we’re retaining our special education teachers as much as possible?

Ingrid W.:

Yeah, let’s do it.

Michael B.:

Wonderful. Okay. Can you share some personal challenges you’ve encountered while working in special education and how did you navigate those challenges?

Ingrid W.:

There are always challenges in special education, I would say every week, if not on the daily. I think one of the most important things in terms of navigating those challenges is really trying to keep kids at the focus, number one, and then depending on what the challenge is, really making a plan about how you’re going to approach things and tackle things because it can feel like things are sort of always coming at you in the special education world. So I think it’s really important to sort of pause, zoom out, make a plan, and then enter the madness once again.

Michael B.:

Yeah, some great tips there and some great thoughts there. I thought it’d be a good place to start the conversation. We got a question as a follow-up from the webinar and you touched on a little bit of the answer to this question, but I thought I’d ask it again, but what are some key tips for creating an environment that supports and retains special education teachers? Ultimately, we’re hoping to lead to improved outcomes for students with diverse needs, but what are some of those key tips you touched on during our conversation related to creating that environment that supports and retains special education teachers?

Ingrid W.:

Yeah, I think it’s important for the school to be inclusive and that also extends to the staff being inclusive, but also recognizing the unique needs of those teachers that you have. So in addition to making sure that they have equitable access to resources, also paying attention to their unique needs and some things that they may need that are outside of what a typical general education teacher might need. I think a lot of that comes down to the culture of a school and being able to walk that line between the fairness aspect of things, which comes up a lot when you’re talking with special education teachers and general education teachers, but it’s really about equity and making sure everyone understands the role that each person is bringing to the table.

Michael B.:

You mentioned some specific initiatives or practices that made differences for retaining special education teachers during our conversation a couple of weeks ago. Can you mention a couple of those key points that you mentioned?

Ingrid W.:

Yeah, so a lot of it I think comes down to that balance between the paperwork side of things and the instructional piece of things. So structuring a teacher’s day intentionally recognizing those pieces is really important. Some folks have the ability to provide paperwork days or a half day. Some folks allow that half day to be off campus or working remotely, and those kinds of perks really do sort of allow a special education teacher to get their work done within the regular workday. Teachers are working late long hours all the time anyway, but in order to have a prayer as a special education teacher of having a work-life balance, you really need time within the school day at least some to get a lot of that work done.

Michael B.:

Yeah, it’s such a good point. I want to pause here for a second and just welcome, we do have a few viewers that are live with us, so if you’ve got questions for Ingrid, we’re more than happy to take those live. I’ll ask another one, but pop them into the chat. If you’re on a browser, it’s on the right-hand side. If you’re on mobile, it’s just below our stream right here, so feel free to ask any questions you’ve got. You mentioned last time we talked that professional development opportunities and training programs were crucial for special education teachers to be able to continue to enhance their skills and knowledge. Can you talk about the importance of those and if you’ve got any ideas on what types of places that school leaders should be recommending special education teachers go look for those development opportunities that you’ve heard of in your experience? I’d be all ears for some of those recommendations as well.

Ingrid W.:

Yeah, I think all teachers want to be good at their jobs. That’s why everyone goes into the profession is to make a difference for students. The preparation that many of our special education teachers get is sometimes alt license or doing one of these alternative programs. We see that a lot in all schools and definitely in charters. But from there, teachers are going to need a lot of professional development in order to be able to feel successful because their preparation programs aren’t going to prepare them for every single thing that they need to do. And it’s critical that they have those opportunities to grow so that they can sustain in a profession because they feel like they are doing a good job.

Some recommendations I would have, there are some really amazing resources on the National Center for Intensive Intervention website and they are completely free. You can do a self-paced module. They have different formats. They have articles, but all of those are really research based and I think that’s a key thing is, what is the research really telling us about what works for students with diverse learning needs and how are we accessing that research in order to drive the professional development that needs to happen?

Michael B.:

I want to grab that URL for those listening. Let me just make sure I got it. Intensive intervention.org, am I grabbing the right URL?

Ingrid W.:

Let me check.

Michael B.:

I do love these live formats ’cause we can go do that and go grab them as we’re sitting here, so we make sure. That’s the website. Correct?

Ingrid W.:

That is the website.

Michael B.:

Wonderful.

Ingrid W.:

If teachers could understand all of the pieces of that website, we’d have a very different world in special education. There is some fantastic resources also about specific literacy programs, progress monitoring, all kinds of links you can find in there to get some really good stuff.

Michael B.:

Lovely. I’ve popped that into the chat so that anybody that’s watching this can grab that URL. One question that we spent a little bit of time on during the webinar was the questions that school leaders can ask or tailor to specific interview questions to assess candidates understanding of special education practices. One you recommended got a lot of agreement in our discussion there from viewers related to IE paperwork and I was hoping you might be able to either share that question or any other questions as thought starters for school leaders to be able to ask when they are recruiting and hiring candidates for these positions.

Ingrid W.:

Yeah, I think the question was around what is the sort of approach that you would take if you are starting a new position as a special education teacher and you come in and realize that you’re inheriting some issues within the department, paperwork, compliance issues, things like that. Sort of, what’s the plan of attack? And that’s going to get at a lot of soft skills, but then also technical skills about what are the actual legally defensible ways to approach a problem like that.

I think there are also… I wrote a couple down ’cause I thought you were going to ask me this. One that I wrote down was how do you determine the frequency and duration of services for a student in their IEP? Again, a lot of it is just listening to how teachers talk about these things, what their thought process is and their thinking. But also you’ll get those, what types of skills do they know? Is the answer, I have no idea and I’m really excited to learn? Or what’s the response to that and how are you ready or not to bring that person along if they’re going to need a lot of support?

Michael B.:

Great questions there to think about for school leaders as they’re looking to hire these candidates for these positions. I know at Project Idea you offer a platform called Managed. Can you give it a brief outline of how it benefits school leaders, particularly for our special education teachers?

Ingrid W.:

Absolutely. So there’s a whole bunch of tasks that special education teachers have to do that really have nothing to do with students. Obviously writing IEPs and sort of the IEP process is critical for student learning. But along with that process comes all of these little logistical tasks, sending out emails and surveys and finding meeting times and sort of wrangling a bunch of people around scheduling. And so managed automates and streamlines those processes as well as sort of supports a school to share out the resources that they have that are going to support their teachers. So teachers get essentially prompted within their email to do whatever step they need to do based on the timeline of the IEP process that is calculated automatically by the system. And then it also will say, “Hey, this is what you need to do and here’s the link to the document that shows you how to do it.” And so the idea is really about changing practices by grounding in documents and then streamlining and making things as automated as possible because that technology exists. And so…

Michael B.:

Yeah, I think that just an incredible platform for, as you’ve talked about, is how do we make sure that the school leaders, especially when it comes to special education, can be focused on students and the outcomes of those students and taking the workload, the caseload, the cadence, the project management time, and just brain power to get those tasks done? And I think that’s what your platform does so well. For those of us that are joining us live, for those of you I who are joining us live, I should say, we are both, both Ingrid and our charter school capital team are headed to Austin next week for the National Charter Schools Conference. So if you have questions for Ingrid and want to do a follow-up and you’re heading down to Austin for what will I would imagine will be two incredible days, two or three incredible days of learning from a bunch of school leaders, from thought leaders and voices from around our space, feel free to go find Ingrid or myself or the Charter School Capital team and we can get you connected while you’re there.

But Ingrid, I just want to say a big thank you to you for joining us on our webinar a couple of weeks ago and for taking some time today. We’re right at that sort of 10 to 12 minute mark and we like to respect that boundary. And I know you’re on vacation, so I want to give you as much time back where you are. But thank you again for joining us on the webinar and today. And for anybody that wants any more information about Project Idea, we’ll leave this last question and wrap it up from here. Where can they find out more information about Managed and Project Idea?

Ingrid W.:

Folks can reach out to me directly at Ingrid@project-idea.org Our website is project-idea.org and if you want to go straight to Managed/managed. And we’d love to see you next week if you’re at the charter conference in Austin.

Michael B.:

Lovely. Well hopefully safe travels from the vacation. Safe travels to Austin, and we’ll be back on Thursday for a follow-up to tomorrow’s webinar on all things cybersecurity. So if you feel like having a conversation related to cybersecurity, come on back. We’ll see you here on YouTube again for a few minutes for our charter chat series on Thursday. Take care everyone. Bye-bye.